How to Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences With Custom Audiences

Want to expand your ad reach on Facebook?

Looking for new ways to target potential customers?

To explore creative ways to combine Facebook lookalike audiences with custom ad audiences, I interview Rick Mulready.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Rick Mulready. Rick is a Facebook ads expert and host of the podcast, The Art of Paid Traffic. He's also a regular speaker at Social Media Marketing World. His new membership site, The ROI Club, is focused on Facebook ads.

Rick explains custom and lookalike audience options that help you make the most of your customer list.

You'll also discover how to use website visitor data, engagements, and lead ads to find new potential customers.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Lookalike Audiences
What Is a Facebook Lookalike Audience?

A lookalike audience is a targeting audience based on a custom audience. Examples of custom audiences include people on your email list, website visitors, and Facebook users who engage with your video or Facebook page. When you create a lookalike audience of a custom audience, Facebook finds users who have similar attributes to the people who are in that base custom audience.

For example, say you have an email list custom audience. To create that audience, you uploaded a list of 10,000 people and Facebook has matched those emails to 6,000 Facebook users. For a lookalike audience based on this custom audience, Facebook will look for Facebook users with similar attributes to those people on your email list.

Facebook knows a lot about its users. Although the data is anonymized, Facebook makes that data available to advertisers to help them reach their ideal target audience.

Listen to the show to hear Rick's and my thoughts about all of the things Facebook and Google know about users.

Why Use a Lookalike Audience?

Lookalike audiences give you a way to reach a cold audience beyond interest or behavior targeting. For example, say you're showing targeted ads to warm traffic, such as people on your email list, website visitors, or Facebook fans. Lookalike audiences give you a way to reach cold audiences that are like those warm audiences but much bigger.

Depending on how closely you want to match your base audience, you can set up a lookalike audience size that's anywhere from 1% to 10%, where the 1% includes only those people who most closely match your base audience. In the U.S., that 1% audience is about 2 million people. As you move toward 10%, the audience size increases but the matching becomes more generic.

You can control the size with a slider that appears when you create the audience. In Facebook Ads Manager, open the Audiences tool and click the Create Audience button. Select the option to create a lookalike audience, and then a box pops up where you select a source, a location, and then the audience size.

The source is the custom audience on which you want to base the lookalike audience. The location is the country or regions on which you want to base the lookalike audience. The audience size has the slider that lets you choose 1%, 2%, 3%, and so on. You also see an advanced option to create multiple versions of that lookalike audience size.

Although a lookalike audience is a cold audience, it's not super-cold (compared to interest or behavior targeting) because Facebook is using the algorithm to match attributes from your warm audience to create this new lookalike audience. To reach new people who aren't already in your warm audiences on Facebook, you definitely want to use and test lookalike audiences.